Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Lily Ray posted a Twitter poll some time ago asking about Google’s disavow link tool. The responses to the question shows that SEOs have serious doubt in how effective and useful the disavow link tool is.

John Mueller of Google said it is okay to whitelist specific IP addresses if you do not want GoogleBot to access that content yet. That is not a form of cloaking and not against Google’s guidelines.

Google is adding another new series to the Google Webmaster YouTube Channel, this one is named Search for Beginners. “An animated series is coming soon, and we’re supporting multi-language learning with subtitles. Learn the basics of creating an onlin…

John Mueller of Google said on Twitter that submitted search spam reports on Twitter is not a great thing to do. He said on Twitter “You’re welcome to submit a spam report if you feel that these aren’t being treated appropriately — Twitter generally i…

When you disavow a link, any and all associations with that link to your page are removed. I kind of thought that was obvious, but John did field a question related to it the other day. He confirmed the associations with the link are removed when you…

Over the weekend, John Mueller of Google had an interesting back and forth with an SEO about a redirect. In short, it seems someone took an old domain, redirected that domain to a new domain, with completely different content on the new domain. The SE…

Lizzi Harvey from Google posted an update to the video structured data page at Google. Now Google is recommending you use the interactionStatistic instead of interactionCount. Google will support both for some time, but if you are using interactionCou…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that when a manual action is removed, the site is immediately free of any manual actions. But, sometimes it can take time for search to process the manual action. He said however, the effects of that might take a b…

Google posted a reminder or PSA yesterday that adding structured data can sometimes help Google automatically generate Actions for the Google Assistant. Google posted this on Twitter and said “Google can use your structured data to automatically genera…

Google’s John Mueller had a fun analogy when it comes to buying used domains and the potential issues they may have. He said it is like buying a used car.

Google has given us a heads up that the new snippet controls it announced a few weeks ago will begin rolling out “in a few days” and “be fully live worldwide by next week.” This coincides with the European press publications changes in France, where G…

Google’s John Mueller is once again telling webmasters that they do not need to respond or lose sleep over ransom link spam attempts. These are when you get an email from someone saying if you don’t do X, i.e…

The latest video that John Mueller of Google fielded was from @abhikasaudhan and it was a good one. Sadly, I am not sure John answered the specific question. The question was “if you need to use structured data exactly as specified in the Google deve…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if it is bad to watermark your images in terms of SEO. Would Google not rank watermarked images as highly in Google Image search as it would non-watermarked images.

Google’s Gary Illyes said you really only need to invest in a link audit if you had some shady SEO done on your site in the past. He said otherwise, if you are just looking for better rankings, there is no need for a link audit to be done.

Google hasn’t been a huge fan of folks using the disavow link tool but the tool remains because it may help some sites that simply have a lot of bad links pointing to it. Gary Illyes of Google said at PubCon that if it was up to him, he would do away …

Gary Illyes from Google was asked if Google search tracks or recognizes authors. He said for Google Search it is more about entities, not authors. But for Google News and Google Scholar, Google does recognize authors. The concept of authorship in Go…

The reason Google changed the nofollow link from a directive to a hint is to give the search engine more flexibility to understand the web. Prior, Google was unable to look at those links at all, it was a directive. Now that it is a hint, Google can …

It appears that Gary Illyes from Google said that if you have a link on a page and that link points to page A, but then you change that same link to point to page B – the value and relevance of that link changes as well. Marie Haynes quoted Gary as sa…

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at PubCon that he would consider content accuracy a ranking factor. He said because of YMYL, he would consider the accuracy of content a ranking factor. This comes a month after Danny Sullivan from Google said Goo…